Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Part 4

He even gambled away the "Stradivarius" that had been presented to him, and when his money, watch and jewels were gone, his new-found friends of course decamped, and this gave the young man time to ponder on the vanities of life.

When he played again it was on a borrowed "Guarnerius," and after the rich owner, himself a violinist, had heard him play, he said, "No fingers but yours shall ever play that violin again!"

Paganini accepted the gift, and this was the violin he played for full forty years, and which, on his death, was willed to his native city of Genoa. There it can be seen in its sealed-up gla.s.s case.

Up to his thirtieth year Paganini continued his severe work of subduing the violin. By that time he had sounded its possibilities, and thereafter no one heard him play except in concert. It is told that one man, anxious to know the secrets of Paganini's power, followed him from city to city, watching him at his concerts, d.o.g.g.i.ng him through the streets, spying upon him at hotels. At one inn this man of curiosity had the felicity to secure a room next to the one occupied by Paganini; and one morning as he watched through the keyhole, he was rewarded by seeing the master open the case where reposed the precious "Guarnerius."

Paganini lifted the instrument, held it under his chin, took up the bow and made a few pa.s.ses in the air--not a sound was heard. Then he kissed the back of the violin, muttered a prayer, and locked the instrument in its case.

At concert rehearsals he always played a mute instrument; and Harris, his manager, records that for the many years he was with Paganini he never heard him play a single note except before an audience.

I have a full-length daguerreotype of Paganini taken when he was forty years of age. No one ever asked this man, "Kind sir, are you anybody in particular?"

Paganini was tall and wofully slim. His hands and feet were large and bony, his arms long, his form bowed and lacking in all that we call symmetry. But the long face with its look of abject melancholy, the curved nose, the thin lips and the sharp, protruding chin, made a combination that Fate has never duplicated. You could easily believe that this man knew all the secrets of the Nether World, and had tasted the joys of Paradise as well. Women pitied and loved him, men feared him, and none understood him. He lived in the midst of throngs and mult.i.tudes--the loneliest man known in the history of art.

Paganini, when he had reached his height, played only his own music; he played divinely and incomprehensibly; next to his pa.s.sion for music was his greed for gold. These three facts sum up all we really know about the master--the rest fades off into mist--mystery, fable and legend. We do know, however, that he composed several pieces of music so difficult that he could not play them himself, and of course no one else can.

Imagination can always outrun performance. Paganini had no close friends; no confidants: he never mingled in society, and he never married.

At times he would disappear from the public gaze for several months, and not even his business a.s.sociates knew where he was. On one such occasion a traveler discovered him in a monastic retreat in the Swiss Mountains, wearing a horsehair robe and a rope girdle; others saw him disguised as a mendicant; and still another tells of finding him working as a day-laborer with obscure and ignorant peasants. Then there are tales told of how he was taken captive by a t.i.tled lady of great wealth and beauty, who carried him away to her bower, where he eschewed the violin and tinkled only the guitar the livelong day.

Everywhere the report was current that Paganini had killed a man, and been sentenced to prison for life. The story ran that in prison he found an old violin, three strings of which were broken, and so he played on one string, producing such ravishing music that the keepers feared he was "possessed." They decided they must get rid of him, and so contrived to have him thrown overboard from a galley; but he swam ash.o.r.e, and although he was everywhere known, no man dared place a hand on him.

A late writer in a London magazine, however, has given evidence of being a psychologist and man of sense; he says, and produces proof, that after the concert season was over Paganini withdrew to a monastery in the mountains of Switzerland, and there the monks who loved him well, guarded his retreat. There he found the rest for which his soul craved, and there he practised on his violin hour after hour, day after day.

All this is better understood when we remember that after each retreat, Paganini appeared with brand-new effects which electrified his hearers--"effects taught him by the devil."

Constant appearing before vast mult.i.tudes and ceaseless travel create a depletion that demands rest. Paganini held the balance true by fleeing to the mountains; there he worked and prayed. That Paganini had a soft heart, in spite of the silent, cold and melancholy mood that usually possessed him, is shown in his treatment of his father and mother, who lived to know the greatness of their son. He wrote his mother kind and affectionate letters, some of which we have, and provided lavishly for every want of both his parents. At times he gave concerts for charity, and on these occasions vast sums were realized.

Paganini died in Eighteen Hundred Forty, aged fifty-six years. His will provided for legacies to various men and women who had befriended him, and he also gave to others with whom he had quarreled, thus proving he was not all clay.

The bulk of his fortune, equal to half a million dollars, was bequeathed to his son, Baron Achille Paganini. And as if mystery should still enshroud his memory and this, true to his nature, should be carried out in his last will, there are those who maintain that Achille Paganini was not his son at all--only a waif he had adopted. Yet Achille always stoutly maintained the distinction--but what boots it, since he could not play his father's violin?

Yet this we know--Paganini, the man of mystery and moods, once lived and produced music that, Orpheus-like, transfixed the world. We are better for his having been and this world is a n.o.bler place in that he lived and played, for listen closely and you can hear, even now, the sweet, sad echoes of those vibrant strings, touched by the hand of him who loved them well.

And when we remember the prodigious amount of practise that Paganini schooled himself to in youth; and join this to the recently discovered record of his long monastic retreats, when for months he worked and played and prayed, we can guess the secret of his power. If you wish me to present you a recipe for doing a deathless performance, I would give you this: Work, travel, solitude, prayer, and yet again--work.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FREDERIC CHOPIN]

FREDERIC CHOPIN

Nature does not design like art, however realistic she may be. She has caprices, inconsequences, probably not real, but very mysterious. Art only rectifies these inconsequences, because it is too limited to reproduce them. Chopin was a resume of these inconsequences which G.o.d alone can allow Himself to create, and which have their particular logic. He was modest on principle, gentle by habit, but he was imperious by instinct and full of a legitimate pride which was unconscious of itself. Hence arose sufferings which he did not reason and which did not fix themselves on a determined object.

--_George Sand in "The Story of My Life"_

FREDERIC CHOPIN

Maybe I am all wrong about it, yet I can not help believing that the spirit of man will live again somewhere in a better world than ours.

Fenelon says, "Justice demands another life in order to make good the inequalities of this." Astronomers prophesy the existence of stars long before they can see them. They know where they ought to be, and training their telescopes in that direction they wait, knowing they will find.

Materially, no one can imagine anything more beautiful than this earth, for the simple reason that we can not imagine anything we have not seen; we may make new combinations, but the whole is all made up of parts of things with which we are familiar. This great green earth out of which we have sprung, of which we are a part, that supports our bodies, and to which our bodies must return to repay the loan, is very, very beautiful.

But the spirit of man is not fully at home here; as we grow in soul and intellect, we hear, and hear again, a voice which says, "Arise and get thee hence, for this is not thy rest." And the greater and n.o.bler and more sublime the spirit, the more constant the discontent. Discontent may come from various causes, so it will not do to a.s.sume that the discontented are always the pure in heart, but it is a fact that the wise and excellent have all known the meaning of world-weariness. The more you study and appreciate this life, the more sure you are that this is not all. You pillow your head upon Mother Earth, listen to her heart-throb, and even as your spirit is filled with the love of her, your gladness is half-pain and there comes to you a joy that hurts.

To look upon the most exalted forms of beauty, such as a sunset at sea, the coming of a storm on the prairie, the shadowy silence of the desert, or the sublime majesty of the mountains, begets a sense of sadness, an increasing loneliness.

It is not enough to say that man encroaches on man so that we are really deprived of our freedom, that civilization is caused by a bacillus, and that from a natural condition we have gotten into a hurly-burly where rivalry is rife--all this may be true, but beyond and outside of all this there is no physical environment in way of plenty which earth can supply, that will give the tired soul peace. They are the happiest who have the least; and the fable of the stricken king and the shirtless beggar contains the germ of truth. The wise hold all earthly ties very lightly--they are stripping for eternity.

World-weariness is only a desire for a better spiritual condition. There is more to be written on this subject of world-pain--to exhaust the theme would require a book. And certain it is that I have no wish to say the final word on any topic. The gentle reader has certain rights, and among these is the privilege of summing up the case. But the fact holds that world-pain is a form of desire. All desires are just, proper and right; and their gratification is the means by which Nature supplies us that which we need. Desire not only causes us to seek that which we need, but is a form of attraction by which the good is brought to us, just as the ameba creates a swirl in the waters that brings its food within reach. Every desire in Nature has a fixed, definite purpose in the Divine Economy, and every desire has its proper gratification. If we desire the friendship of a certain person, it is because that person has certain soul-qualities that we do not possess, and which complement our own. Through desire do we come into possession of our own; by submitting to its beckonings we add cubits to our stature; and we also give out to others our own attributes, without becoming poorer, for soul is not limited.

All Nature is a symbol of spirit, so I believe that somewhere there must be a proper gratification for this mysterious nostalgia of the soul. The Eternal Unities require a condition where men and women will live to love, and not to sorrow; where the tyranny of things hated shall not ever prevail, nor that for which the heart yearns turn to ashes at our touch.

"I believe Stevie is not quite at home here--he'll not remain so very long," said a woman to me in Eighteen Hundred Ninety-five. Five years have gone by, and recently the cable flashed the news that Stephen Crane was dead.

Dead at twenty-nine, with ten books to his credit, two of them good, which is two good books more than most of us scribblers will ever write.

Yes, Stephen Crane wrote two things that are immortal. "The Red Badge of Courage" is the strongest, most vivid work of imagination ever fished from an ink-pot by an American.

"Men who write from the imagination are helpless when in presence of the fact," said James Russell Lowell. In answer to which I'll point you "The Open Boat," the sternest, creepiest bit of realism ever penned, and Stevie was in the boat.

American critics honored Stephen Crane with more ridicule, abuse and unkind comment than was bestowed on any other writer of his time.

Possibly the vagueness, and the loose, unsleeked quality of his work invited the gibes, jeers, and the loud laughter that tokens the vacant mind; yet as half-apology for the critics we might say that scathing criticism never killed good work; and this is true, but it sometimes has killed the man.

Stephen Crane never answered back, nor made explanation, but that he was stung by the continued efforts of the press to laugh him down, I am very sure.

The lack of appreciation at home caused him to shake the dust of America from his feet and take up his abode across the sea, where his genius was being recognized, and where strong men stretched out sinewy hands of welcome, and words of appreciation were heard, instead of silly, insulting parody. In pa.s.sing, it is well to note that the five strongest writers of America had their pa.s.sports to greatness viseed in England before they were granted recognition at home. I refer to Walt Whitman, Th.o.r.eau, Emerson, Poe and Stephen Crane.

Stevie did not know he cared for approbation, but his constant refusal to read what the newspapers said about him was proof that he did. He boycotted the tribe of Romeike, because he knew that nine clippings out of every ten would be unkind, and his sensitive soul shrank from the pin-p.r.i.c.ks.

Contemporary estimates are usually wrong, and Crane is only another of the long list of men of genius to whom Fame brings a wreath and finds her poet dead.

Stephen Crane was a reincarnation of Frederic Chopin. Both were small in stature, slight, fair-haired, and of that sensitive, acute, receptive temperament--capable of highest joy and keyed for exquisite pain.

Haunted with the prophetic vision of quick-coming death, and with the hectic desire to get their work done, they often toiled the night away and were surprised by the rays of the rising sun. Both were shrinking yet proud, shy but bold, with a tenderness and a feminine longing for love that earth could not requite. At times mad gaiety, that ill-masked a breaking heart, took the reins, and the spirits of children just out of school seemed to hold the road. At other times--and this was the prevailing mood--the manner was one of placid, patient, calm and smooth, unruffled hope; but back and behind all was a dynamo of energy, a brooding melancholy of unrest, and the crouching world-sorrow that would not down.

Chopin reached sublimity through sweet sounds; Crane attained the same heights through the sense of sight and words that symboled color, shapes and scenes. In each the distinguishing feature is the intense imagination and active sympathy. Knowledge consists in a sense of values--of distinguishing this from that, for truth lies in the ma.s.s.

The delicate nuances of Chopin's music have never been equaled by another composer; every note is cryptic, every sound a symbol. And yet it is dance-music, too, but still it tells its story of baffled hope and stifled desire--the tragedy of Poland in sweet sounds.

Stephen Crane was an artist in his ability to convey the feeling by just the right word, or a word misplaced, like a lady's dress in disarray, or a hat askew. This daring quality marks everything he wrote. The recognition that language is fluid, and at best only an expedient, flavors all his work. He makes no fetish of a grammar--if grammar gets in the way, so much the worse for the grammar. All is packed with color, and charged with feeling, yet the work is usually quiet in quality and modest in manner.

Art is born of heart, not head; and so it seems to me that the work of these men whose names I have somewhat arbitrarily linked, will live.

Each sowed in sorrow and reaped in grief. They were tender, kind, gentle, with a capacity for love that pa.s.ses the love of woman. They were each indifferent to the proprieties, very much as children are.

They lived in cloister-like retirement, hidden from the public gaze, or wandered unnoticed and unknown. They founded no schools, delivered no public addresses, and in their own day made small impress on the times.

Both were sublimely indifferent to what had been said and done--the term precedent not being found within the covers of their bright lexicon of words. In the nature of each was a goodly trace of peroxide of iron that often manifested itself in the man's work.

The faults in each spring from an intense personality, uncolored by the surroundings, and such faults in such men are virtues.